A tongue scraper is a tool used to help clean your tongue. It is designed to clean the bacterial build-up, food debris, and dead cells from the surface of the tongue. Cleaning your tongue, especially the back part of your tongue, helps to remove the bacteria that cause plaque, tooth decay, and disease.
Why Use a Tongue Scraper?
1. Enhances Your Taste Buds. Your taste buds can be blocked by all the bacteria on your tongue and removing this build-up will enhance the flavor of the food you eat.
2. It Improves your Digestive Health. Tongue scraping promotes saliva production, which helps with your digestion.
3. It Will Banish Bad Breath. Bad breadth is usually due to bacteria from food particles being stuck on the tongue which can cause a foul smell.
How Do You Use a Tongue Scraper?
1. Stick your tongue out and take the tongue scraper and take it to the back most portion of the tongue. You may experience a gag refl ex when the scraper touches the rear part of your tongue and this is normal and once you get used to using the scraper you will eventually be able to clean the back portion of your tongue.
2. Gently run the scraper from the back of your tongue to the front of your tongue
3. Initially you may see a yellowish exudate coming out of the scraper but as you begin to clean your tongue more and more, the exudate will be clear in color.
Tongue scrapers come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and are inexpensive and are available at grocery and drug stores.
I hope this Tooth Talk has helped, if you have questions call or email me at Integrity Dental Care, PLLC (615) 445-8700 or email dr.jmitchell@dentalcares.com with any you may have.
